Hi everyone, I’m running an Arducam Camarray Hat with four 16MP IMX519 cameras on a Pi. I had this working before - I followed the Quick Start Guide and managed to get all four video feeds showing in the preview window. Now when I run libcamera-hello I just get: ERROR: *** no cameras available ***. Nothing has changed on the wiring side as far as I can tell. Any ideas what could cause this?
Thanks for the details. That error usually means the camera stack can’t see any of the IMX519s at all. Can you share a bit more about your setup - which OS image are you currently on, and have you changed anything recently (OS update, kernel, wiring, etc.)? Also, can you run dmesg | grep imx519 and paste what comes back?
Sure. I was originally on the 32-bit Bullseye OS and it worked fine. Since the error started, I’ve also tried resetting the OS and flashing the 64-bit Bookworm version to rule out a software problem, but I get the exact same error on both. Here’s the dmesg output: imx519 10-001a: failed to read chip id 519, with error -5. And libcamera-hello still gives: ERROR: *** no cameras available ***.
Okay, that dmesg line is important. ‘failed to read chip id 519, with error -5’ means the driver is trying to talk to the sensor over I2C and getting nothing back (error -5 is EIO). Since the same thing happens on both 32-bit Bullseye and 64-bit Bookworm, that points more toward the hardware/connection side than the software image. Could you post a couple of clear photos of the Hat and how the four camera flex cables are seated?
Looking at it now, the Hat is seated on the GPIO and the camera flex cables appear to be inserted. I’ll try to get some good photos and send them over. Is there a specific area you want me to focus on?
Yes - the 22-pin connectors on the Hat side and the camera side, plus the GPIO header alignment. In the meantime, let’s grab a proper diagnostic report so we can see the full picture. Please reboot the Pi first, then run these commands:
wget -O arducam-camera-bug-report https://github.com/ketai-dhr/arducam-camera-bug-report/releases/download/tools/arducam-camera-bug-report
chmod +x ./arducam-camera-bug-report
./arducam-camera-bug-report
That will generate an arducam-bug-report.txt file in the current directory. It can contain system info you might not want public, so please send it to me via private message rather than posting it here.
Thanks, I rebooted and ran the three commands. It created arducam-bug-report.txt in the current directory. I’ll send that over in a private message, and I’ll add the hardware photos there too once I get decent ones. Out of curiosity, what does the chip id read failure actually tell us?
Great, that report plus the photos will help a lot. The chip id read failure means the IMX519 at I2C address 0x1a (shown as 10-001a, bus 10) isn’t responding when the driver tries to identify it. With four cameras behind the Camarray Hat, even one marginal link can take the whole bus down, which would explain why libcamera reports ‘no cameras available’. We’re still in the diagnostics phase right now - the bug report and connection photos will help narrow down whether it’s a wiring/contact issue or something on the Hat itself. I’ll wait for your message and take it from there.